[Nietzsche] failed, as all moderns must fail when they attempt, like him, to embrace the tragic spirit as a religious faith, because the resurgence of that faith is not an intellectual but a vital phenomenon, something not achieved by taking thought but born, on the contrary, out of an instinctive confidence in life which is nearer to the animal's unquestioning allegiance to the scheme of nature than it is to that critical intelligence characteristic of a fully developed humanism. And like other faiths it is not to be recaptured merely by reaching an intellectual conviction that it would be desirable to do so.
-Joseph Wood Krutch, The Modern Temper

Affirmation of life even in its strangest and sternest
problems, the will to life rejoicing in its own
inexhaustibility through the sacrifice of its highest
types-that is what I called Dionysian, that is what
I recognized as the bridge to the psychology of
the tragic poet. Not so as to get rid of pity and
terror, not so as to purify oneself of a dangerous
emotion through its vehement discharge but,
beyond pity and terror, to realize in oneself the
eternal joy of becoming-that joy which also
encompasses joy in destruction.
-Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

For our Senior January at Colgate, Chuck & I took a course on Socrates
with Professor Kraynak, who was not only one of the only conservative professors
that I have ever met in academe, he may have been the only one who was
just clearly the smartest person in the room. Despite the considerable
obstacle posed by his mandatory attendance policy, I thoroughly enjoyed
this class and the subsequent political science class I took with him.

One of the texts we read for the Socrates course was Nietzsche's Birth
of Tragedy. Nietzsche's central argument is that Greek Tragedy
was the apotheosis of human arts because it best expressed the beautiful
"terror and horror of existence". Nietzsche posited two competing
elements: the Dionysian--representing music, primal urges and ecstasy;
and the Apollonian--representing the restraint and control of sculpture,
dreams and prophecy. To him Attic tragedy had struck just the right
balance, with the Apollonian impulse toward order only just succeeding
in adding structure to the primordial beauty of Dionysian instinctive savagery:

...in the ecstasy of the Dionysian state, with its
annihilation of the ordinary bounds and limits of
existence, there is contained a lethargic element,
in which we are submerged all past personal
experiences. It is this gulf of oblivion that
separates the world of everyday from the world of
Dionysian reality. But as soon as we become
conscious of this everyday reality, we feel it as
nauseating and repulsive; and an ascetic will-negating
mood is the fruit of these states. ... But at this
juncture, when the will is most imperiled, art approaches,
as a redeeming and healing enchantress;
she alone may transform these horrible reflections
on the terror and absurdity of existence into
representations with which man may live. These
are the representation of the sublime as the
conquest of the awful, and of the comic as the artistic
release from the nausea of the absurd.

Yes, he says, life is awful, but art makes it endurable and Greek tragedy
was the pinnacle of art.

But then a new force came upon the scene; as Socrates and scientific
reason introduced a new, and for Nietzsche destructive, element into the
equation which brought the reign of Dionysus to an end. Socrates
enunciated three maxims:

-Virtue is knowledge

-Man sins only from ignorance

-He who is virtuous is happy

and as Nietzsche said, "In these three fundamental forms of optimism
lies the death of tragedy." This optimism Nietzsche believed to be
an illusion, "the imperturbable belief that, with the clue of logic, thinking
can reach to the nethermost depths of being, and that thinking can not
only perceive being but even modify it." Therefore, Nietzsche called
for a return to Dionysian drama and believed that German artists and philosophers
were uniquely suited to lead this rebirth of tragedy. In fact, the
book is dedicated to Richard Wagner, whom Nietzsche saw as the artist most
likely to succeed in this task. But then Wagner wrote Parsifal,
with its Christian themes, and the two became estranged.

I don't have any particular argument with Nietzsche's assessment of
the historical facts. But he's basically just arguing for the kind
of amoral Franco-German existentialism that has made both of those peoples
and their cultures so unpleasant. The philosophers of the European
continent have for two centuries now fought a rearguard action against
both Judeo-Christianity and the Age of Reason. But Western Civilization
is ultimately a product of these two great ideological revolutions and
by any measure, you'd have to say that their adherents have the better
of this argument.

One brief discussion in here suffices to show how Nietzsche's sort of
weird prejudices warped his capacity to think clearly--his comparison of
Prometheus and the Fall of Man. He completely misreads the two stories
to say:

The best and highest that man can acquire they must
obtain by a crime, and then they must endure
its consequences, namely the whole flood of sufferings
and sorrows with which the offended
divinities must requite the nobly aspiring race
of man. It is a bitter thought, which by the dignity it
confers on crime, contrasts strangely with the Semitic
myth of the fall of man, in which curiosity,
deception, weakness in the face of temptation, wantoness,--in
short, a whole series of preeminently
feminine passions,--were regarded as the origin
of evil. What distinguishes the Aryan conception is
the sublime view of active sin as the essential
Promethean virtue, and the discovery of the ethical
basis of pessimistic tragedy in the justification
of human evil--of human guilt as well as of the
suffering incurred thereby.

This is, of course, pure rot. In fact, the Promethean myth (see
Orrin's
review) is based on a semi-divine being stealing fire and giving it
to man. Genesis features man as the active hero, taking from
the Tree of Knowledge himself and suffering the consequences himself, instead
of just leaving Prometheus to have his entrails ripped out daily.
Failing to understand the stories, Nietzsche draws the wrong conclusions:

He who understands this innermost core of the Prometheus
myth--namely, the necessity of crime
imposed on the titanically striving individual--will
at once feel the un-Apollonian element in this
pessimistic representation. For Apollo seeks
to calm individual beings precisely by drawing
boundary lines between them, and by again and again,
with his requirements of self-knowledge and
self-control, recalling these bounds to us as the
holiest laws of the universe.

Nietzsche's vision of Man, necessarily fueled by individual striving
and crime, represents a return to Hobbes's state of nature. It has
a Darwinian survival-of-the-fittest appeal, but there is no reason to believe
that it would lead to progress for Man as a species. Look at the
nations where law and morality have ceased to function--Somalia, Columbia,
Rwanda, etc.--and show me anything good that has come of it. It turns
out that Man's greatest strides have come in precisely those cultures which
have embraced the Apollonian. Apparently, self-knowledge and self-control
aren't such a bad deal at the end of the day.

I'm not going to try to deny Nietzsche's brilliance nor his importance,
but I do deny the value of his philosophy to humankind. You've got
to be familiar with his work, but God help anyone who buys what he's selling.

Comments:

Erm, well, pretty shallow I'm afraid, it demonstrates a fantastic misunderstanding of the Birth. You didn't submit that as a piece in college did you?!

- Bex

- Mar-03-2005, 07:19

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This is a very powerful piece that is well organized and well understood. thank u for this nice essay. Manar

- manar

- Feb-10-2005, 21:43

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Before I give my opinion on this "essay", let me say that the quotes you mentioned helped me in explaining the Dionysian element in my paper. That said, I can understand where you are coming from if you have just taken random quotes from the internet, read them, and decided to state your opinion. But if you actually read Nietzsche's books and tried to understand where he was coming from, then a. you provide a very shallow argument and b. you need to reread the books. Your taking way to many topics Nietzsche worked ages to try to explain to people like us and comment on them in a few sentences. And I would caution you in making such a bold sentence in the end; its quite offensive.

-

- Dec-16-2004, 00:36

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who ever wrote that this is "hysterical and one of the worst interpretations they've ever read" seems ignorant for not offering why or in what ways. If they want to be taken seriously perhaps they should offer something of substance instead of talking shit.

-

- Nov-11-2004, 19:26

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hysterical, seriously one of the worst understandings of Nietzsche I have ever read.